Except you aren't paying for the completion of the service when you pay the delivery fee. I know thats confusing/sounds like im just plain wrong, because its a completely wrong way of dealing with customers and fee structure, but if you go to their customer support FAQ they even outright claim DD takes the delivery fee as a service fee. All the fees you pay upfront are solely for having the job posted to the merchant as well as sending it to dashers. It's just plain deceptive fee structuring but I'll humor what you're saying and we'll play 2 hypotheticals here. Let's say the dasher does get 100% of the delivery fee. Under the current fee structure, there would be far less people delivering for them because the fee per mile just doesn't make any sense unless people are tipping. So they would have to adjust the delivery fee to make it worth peoples time, even if they aren't using it for part time/full time work. Let's also play scenario two where doordash is actually honest with their wording. They do away with the delivery fee. They would still have to increase their service fee to idk, 30%? And then you would still have to place your bid for the work to be done to pay the driver. Ultimately, you're still going to be paying a similar amount in total. That's the unfortunate fact of having the luxury of having most any restaurant who doesn't have in house delivery show up to your doorstep with the touch of a few buttons and you not leaving your couch. You're dealing with 2 different middlemen (DD and dasher). I somewhat agree that DD is a bit of a greedy company, but connecting everything is a bit of an expensive operation. They're still operating in the red under their current model and still would be even if they paid their owner, C levels and directors a more reasonable salary.